ART: PERU'S 'NAZCA LINES' AS SEEN FROM AIR

By GRACE GLUECK

Published: February 5, 1982

WHO made the ''Nazca lines,'' drawings so vast they can be seen only from the air, in the Nazca desert along the south coast of Peru? And why? These birds, beasts, flowers, spirals, mazes, grids and geometric motifs thousands of feet long and drawn on the soft flats and hillsides of the desert, ha ve been known for more than 40 years. But they are still a mystery to archeologists, who say they are contemporary with the Paracas-Nazca Indian culture (around 300 B.C. to A.D. 900).

A German mathematician, Maria Reiche, who has lived in the desert for more than 30 years documenting and preserving the drawings, theorizes that they were of astronomical significance and notes that many of the lines led directly to the rising and setting points of certain celestial bodies on the horizon. But there has been other speculation that they had to do with religious ritual.

Ancient earth drawings and earthworks are by no means unique to Nazca; they have been found at other sites in North and South America, in Britain and in Japan. (To say nothing of the work of such ''earth'' artists of the 1960's as the late Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Richard Long.) But the ones at Nazca are remarkable for their density, precision and visibility only from the air.

To preserve the drawings for posterity, a young American photographer named Marilyn Bridges flew over the desert three years ago. Sixty of her photographs are now on view at the Center for Inter-American Relations, 680 Park Avenue, at 68th Street, installed along with examples of contemporaneous Paracas-Nazca pottery. Aside from their documentary value, the photographs are beautiful in themselves, taken with an artist's eye for shapes and patterns. As clearly as Miss Bridg es's work reveals them, it also intensifies the mystery of their creation. (Through Feb. 21.)

Other shows of interest this week: Marcos Dimas (El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street): In his very energetic work -paintings, drawings, assemblages and bizarre furniture constructions -Marcos Dimas attempts to deal in contemporary terms with the ancient Taino culture of his native Puerto Rico.

Indian trappings, adornments and symbols - flowers, feathers, trees, fishes, boats - and, oddly, umbrellas are important symbols in the work, but their dreamlike, associative rendering makes each form suggest or double as another. In the painting ''El Bohique'' (roughly translated as ''The Shaman''), for example, a very grasping, octopoid tree trunk stretches out its limbs in a jungly undergrowth, grasping a kind of witch-doctor's scepter; the trunk suggests an elephant's. And in the drawing ''Ritual Assemblages,'' an elephant head develops appendages like an umbrella's.

There's a vigor to the paintings, but it's the constructions and assemblages that really show the artist's strength. They range from a small wall piece called ''Tribute to Tito,'' in which three stiffened paper bags, adorned with feathers, dance together on a small platform, to ''The Voyager,'' a construction in which a flattened umbrella, a fish or two, a boat and a mirror take on the presence of a shrine. An environment called ''Dream Room,'' whose walls are stenciled with birds, lizards and flowers, presents small, surreal pieces of ''furniture'': an unsittable, curtailed chair, whose red cushioned seat resembles a tightly closed pair of lips; a ''vanity'' table topped by an inverted triangle of nail-studded polyurethane foam, a lamp whose shade is covered with tiny horns, and so on.

Mr. Dimas's work, a fusion of ancient imagery with a 20th-century urban consciousness, evokes such other ''ritualists'' as Bettye Saar and Rafael Ferrer. But his talent and invention are very much his own. (Through March 7.)

Krishna Reddy (Bronx Museum of the Arts, Grand Concourse and 161 Street): A sculptor turned printmaker, who was associated for many years with Atelier 17, Stanley William Hayter's famous print workshop in Paris, Krishna Reddy is today coordinator of the graphics and printmaking program in the department of art and art education at New York University. He is well known as a teacher and a technical innovator in color printmaking, having refined a method of printing many colors simultaneously from a single plate by ''sculpturing'' the plate in relief and controlling the ink's viscosity.

Many of the sculptured plates are shown. The images themselves, drawn from natural forms, grow progressively more abstract over the years. In such early prints as ''Jellyfish,'' ''Wave,'' ''Tree Trunk,'' more or less representational shapes are beautifully built up, with a simultaneity of color and texture that is very pleasing.

Later, the prints become much more abstract and linear. Mr. Reddy has a Giacomettiesque way of drawing the human figure, and when incorporated as multiple images in the later prints, it becomes nondescriptive to the point of nonrecognition. In ''Clown Forming,'' described by the artist as an image of spectators sitting in rows around a central image of a clown being formed from clouds, the print emerges as a linear, circular pattern - reminiscent of a Baroque ceiling decoration - in which the theme cannot be read. The work becomes decorative and very slight. (Through March 14.)

Elie Nadelman (Wave Hill Environmental Center, Independence Avenue and West 249th Street, the Bronx): Don't think the only big birthday centennials this month are in po litics (Franklin D. Roosevelt) and literature (J ames Joyce). Feb. 20 marks the 100th birthday of the sculptor Elie Nadelman (1882-1946), who spent the last 26 years of his life livi ng and working in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. By way of a c entennial celebration, a small show of Nadelman sculptures an d drawings from the collection of his son, Jan, are on view at Wave Hill.

The show could be called ''Nadelman on Women,'' because it deals exclusively with the sculptor's female images, and within its small scope it manages to convey the wide range of style and media he worked in. There's an exuberant, painted bronze bust of a zaftig woman with her hair in a topknot, a bronze full-length nude, a beautiful, very stylized marble head never shown before of a woman with a pompadour and other pieces. (Through March 31.)